Discussion (30) ¬

so he wasn´t ordered to loose his webbs, they merely left him floundering and did nothing as circumstances bullied him into it….makes me wonder if then had to as well, since i don´t think you can pull a trigger with those.
also, i´m totally voting to get him swimming gloves for his birthday!

The problem is he can’t use his abilities as an echo publicly. They are still classified and probably freak out his patients more, given Todd’s previous reaction even though he knows Pohl is a good guy.

To be fair, we as humans are very bad at designing tools and equipment for non-humans to use. Ever notice that fantasy armor for non-human people mostly covers just the humanoid portions of the body? And unless their hands are human-like in someway they’re not holding any proper tools either.

Someone would literally have to invent medical gloves for Saronthi hands, and since they weren’t a publicly known species at the time, no one has any alternatives to make this work. Necessity is the mother of invention after all.

There’s also the problem of geometry. Like it or not, a fully-webbed hand just isn’t as simple to cover as a human hand; not and keep the covering skin tight.

A human glove is basically a pocket with 5 tubes coming off it- the tubes are able to be tight around the fingers, and since they hinge off the pocket and pocket (palm, that is) doesn’t need to flex, it can just kinda hang there.

A Sarnothi glove, however, would have to be all pocket- and pockets don’t hold to the concavity of a closing hand very well.

Medically speaking the issue I would see with spray-on or died-liquid hand barriers is the uneven surfaces and grooves. Latex gloves are smooth and have minimal nooks and crannies in the surface that would hold on to contagions. A spray-on or dipped-and-dried barrier would probably not be that smooth, and wuld carry a higher ris of transporting contaminants.

Caveat: I have no research or expertise on this, just thinking off the top of my head about it.

Another problem is how long it would take to dry. I have liquid electrical tape at work but it takes so long to dry that I never use it. It would be impractical as Pool would have to put it on, let it dry, scrape it off and repeat that for every patient.

While on the subject of speaking medically, it’s also worth noting that it is virtually impossible for Pohl to give or receive any illness or virus between himself and his human patients, because they are entirely different species, farther removed genetically than a human would be with a mouse. It would be like giving a carrot a cold.

However, it’s quite possible for him to transfer a virus from one human patient to another while touching both. Washing his hands or switching gloves in between are *equally* effective means to prevent this… however, his patients are accustomed to seeing sterile gloves on hands as a sign hygiene is being maintained. They can’t really SEE proof that he made use of the hand sanitizers in dispensers at the entrance to every single room.

So yeah, for an author who (so far as I know) doesn’t have a medical background, you’ve depicted this situation pretty realistically, Dave. Well done!

Shame, this was a job for an engineer. A pretty simple job at that. Just needed to use his hands (and some others with different size hands) to make a mold, maybe use a different more stretchy latex, and thicken it up at the fingertips for the claws. Matter of fact, if the teacher talked to someone from the engineering department and they walk up AFTER he’s surgically removed his webs that would be hilarious.